Category Archives: General

We try our best here to keep you appraised, at the very least, of the daily television offerings every day despite the challenges of travel or demands of day to day life. That all falls apart at times when travel takes us to parts of the world where wifi is rare and/or prohibitively expensive. These [...]

Birth, death, time passage. We cover it all on Friday Night Rock. Tonight, started with some music from Guy Clark, who died Tuesday at 74. There were some songs from Cher who somehow turned 70 today; it was also Joe Cocker’s birthday, he died at 70 two years ago. Heard a great deal from Bob [...]

“Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures” (HBO, 9 p.m.) takes its title from Sen. Jesse Helms admonitions in his effort to ban the work in the 80s. IT’s endured, and the documentary was made to coincide with recent concurrent exhibits at LACMA and the Getty, which received a cache of his work after the artist’s death. [...]

Things are wide open enough on broadcast TV today to even accommodate something as odd as “You, Me and the Apocalypse” (NBC, 8 p.m.) an internationally-made kind of adventure/comedy thing that focuses on a handful of disparate characters in different parts of the world (they keep zooming in on the globe) and tying them into [...]

“Chelsea Does…” (Netflix, streaming) is a series of four documentaries in which comedian and former talk show host Chelsea Handler investigates various topics haphazardly, and sometimes only so she can throw in her own opinions and snarky humor. Marriage, racism, drugs and Silicon Valley are subjects in the four hour long films. Her investigations come [...]

Because it’s the biggest scripted thing on cable “The Walking Dead” (AMC, 6:30 p.m.) has inevitably led to copycats, including its own spin-off. Unfortunately, “Fear The Walking Dead” (AMC, 10 p.m.) still doesn’t explain what started the zombie apocalypse. And it’s one of those oddly-timed prequels that, like “Bates Motel,” seems to have taken place [...]

Fifty years ago, in an era when people were looking up to the stars largely through the achievements of the U.S. space program, Nick Piantanida, a long distance truck driver from Union City, N.J., had his own space dream. Dressed in his own version of a space suit, he planned ways to get up to [...]

In the first panel of the TV Critics Association summer press tour, for the Netflix comedy “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” I got to ask Ellie Kemper about her summer stint on NBC’s “Today” show. “I subbed in while some of the anchors were away this summer for three weeks,” she said. “And, yeah, it was [...]